Soyo SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 V1.0 Review :: Setup and Software

Setup was painless and easy. The included Quick Start Guide is wonderfully illustrated concise and clear. While many manufacturers include a multi-language instruction manual, Soyo's is solely in English. There is a more detailed manual on the CD-ROM, if you're a newbie. If you've put together a computer before the manual gives you all the information that you could possibly want. After installing the CPU, video card and a stick of memory I minimum booted the system. It POSTed right away and I then proceeded to install drives and the 2nd memory stick.

Windows installation went without a hitch. In fact, here I'd like to say some good words about the installation. Most SATA drive installations require you to have a floppy disk to install Windows XP because the SATA driver is not recognized by Windows. In this case the drive was recognized by the BIOS as a SATA HDD and installing Windows did NOT require you to get a floppy disk driver. More and more companies do not require this and this is hopefully something that will continue. It wasn't a leftover driver from the previous motherboard because I formatted/installed Windows fresh and the previous board was a AMD Athlon 64 939 board which doesn't have an ICH5 South Bridge.

Drivers were setup with the included Installation CD. Soyo has a automatic driver install that requires you to highlight the driver that you need to install and click ok. Simple isn't it? As long as you pick the right motherboard, you can't go wrong with the installation. After the standard Intel Inf installation and installation of the LAN and sound drivers I was good to go. Even the most newbie computer builder should have no problem installing this motherboard.

The board comes with 4 different software programs, which are useful items. The programs are DPU which is a drive restoration program, ImageIt which is a disk saving program, ProMagic which is a System Restore Program, Data Processing Utility, which is a instant file restoration program, and Panda Platinum Anti Virus Software.

ImageIt is in a sense like Norton's Ghost software. You can make an image of your hard disk drive, as a backup to it and then restore the image on the hard disk drive with Imageit in a few easy steps. You can backup your HDD either manually or automatically. Restoring the image is simplicity itself just follow the directions on the manual. Strangely the software came with a CDROM virus and wasn't able to install (which was luckily found by the included Panda AntiVirus Titanium software I installed prior to trying to install ImageIt.) Below is a screenshot of the error:

Virus Detected

ProMagic is a System Restore like program. Microsoft has included a limited program in Windows XP to restore the system to a saved point in time. ProMagic is similar in functionality but is more sophisticated.
The full version gives you control over things like multi-boot, and allows you to schedule times when to backup the system. The version included with the Soyo motherboard allows you to backup your system, and give another computer user control to try and fix your problem.

Pro Magic 6.0

Pro Magic 6.0

Pro Magic 6.0

Pro Magic 6.0

Pro Magic 6.0

The third piece of software included with the bundle for the Soyo motherboard is anti-virus software from Panda. The version provided is a 30-day evaluation version that includes one free update. It proved its worth right away by finding a virus on the Bonus Software CD! Needless to say it shows the necessity of having a good antivirus program on your computer. The virus that was found was called Natas.4744 which according to Symantec is a memory-resident polymorphic virus that can cause you to lose information on your HDD or floppy drive.

Panda

Panda

Data Processing Utility is an easy to use instant file restoration utility. If you have an important document that you're working on, simply save it at certain points in time. If a virus later hits you simply restore the file from DPU and it's back to where it started. When used with ProMagic and ImageIt (assuming you get a clean version) it provides you extra protection to easily restore your system to a prior point in time.